A Book About Lawyers
In the gaslit corridors of the Inns of Court, once echoed the footsteps of barristers who brought their wives and daughters to dine in chambers, who kept house with domestic servants and fostered a community where the legal and the familial intertwined. Jeaffreson constructs a poignant portrait of a vanished world: the great legal inns of old England, where lawyers lived not as solitary practitioners but as patriarchs embedded in thick webs of household and community. Through anecdote and reflection, he traces the slow erosion of this domestic order, the retreat of women from the social life of the courts, the cooling of the old familial warmth that once defined the barrister's existence. This is less a history than a lamentation for a world where love, marriage, and professional life had not yet pulled apart into their modern alienation. For readers who find in Victorian England a treasure house of vanished customs and quietly devastating social change.
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“CHAPTER I. LADIES IN LAW COLLEGES. A law-student of the present day finds it difficult to realize the brightness and domestic decency which characterized the Inns of Court in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Under existing circumstances, women of character and social position avoid the gardens and terraces of Gray's Inn and the Temple. Attended by men, or protected by circumstances that guard them from impertinence and scandal, gentlewomen can without discomfort pass and repass the walls of our legal colleges; but in most cases a lady enters them under conditions that announce even to casual passers the object of her visit. In her carriage, during the later hours of the day, a barrister's wife may drive down the Middle Temple Lane, or through the gate of Lincoln's Inn, and wait in King's Bench Walk or New Square,””
— John Cordy Jeaffreson
